The Secret Battle Part 5

Sometimes as you went up wind you put your hand suddenly on a dead man, and had to lie close beside him for cover. Or you scented him far off like a dog nosing through the gra.s.s, and made him a landmark, whispering to your companion, 'Keep fifty yards from the dead 'un,' or 'Make for the dead Boche.'

When the lights went up you lay very close, peering ahead under your cap; and as they fell away to the ground all your vision became full of moving things and fugitive shadows. The thick rows of wiring posts looked like men working, and that cl.u.s.ter of stones like the head of a man in a sh.e.l.l-hole, watching ... watching you ... gone in an instant.... Then you waited tensely for the next light. There is the murmur of voices somewhere, very difficult to locate. For a long while you stalk it, ready to attack some patrol, some working-party. Then you hear a familiar Tyneside curse ... it is A Company wiring, with much noise.

All this, as I have said, is a heavy strain on mind and body and nerve.

It requires a peculiar kind of courage, a lonely, cold-blooded kind of courage. Many men who would do well in a slap-dash fight in the light of day are useless as scouts. Not only are they noisy and impatient, but they cannot stand it.

And yet it is no job for a very imaginative man. There are too many things you can imagine, if you once begin. The more you know about it, the more there is to imagine, and the greater the strain becomes. Now Harry had a very vivid imagination, and he knew all about it--and yet he played this game nearly every night we were in the line for three months ... nothing theatrical, you understand, nor even heroic by popular standards, no stabbing affrays, no medals ... but by my standards it _was_ very nearly heroic, and I don't know how he did it.

But this was forgotten later on.

IV

Then Harry had a shock. There was a large sap running out from our line along the crown of a steep ridge. This sap was not held during the day, but at night was peopled with bombers and snipers, and it was a great starting-place for the patrols. One night Harry went out from this sap and crawled down the face of the ridge. It was a dark night, and the Boches were throwing up many flares. One of these came to earth ten yards from Harry. At that moment he was halfway down the slope, crouched on one knee. However, when flares are about, to keep still in any posture is better than to move, so Harry remained rigid. But one of the new scouts behind was just leaving the sap, and hovered uncertainly on the skyline as the light flared and sizzled below. Possibly he was seen, possibly what followed was a chance freak of the Germans. Anyhow, a moment later they opened with every machine-gun in the line, with rifles, rifle-grenades, and high-velocity sh.e.l.ls. So venomous was the fire that every man in the line believed--and afterwards hotly a.s.serted--that the whole fury of it was concentrated on his particular yard of trench. Few of us thought of the unhappy scouts lying naked outside. Harry, of course, flattened himself to the ground, and tried to wriggle into a hollow; on level ground you may with luck be safe under wild fire of this kind for a long time. Being on a slope, Harry was hopelessly exposed. 'I lay there,' he told me, 'and simply sweated with funk; you won't believe me, but at one time I could literally _feel_ a stream of machine-gun bullets ruffling my hair, and thudding into the bank just above my back ... and they dropped half a dozen whizz-bangs just in front of me. While it was going on I couldn't have moved for a thousand pounds.... I felt _pinned_ to the ground ... then there was a lull, and I leapt up ... so did old Smith ... bolted for the sap, and simply dived in head first ... they were still blazing off sixteen to the dozen, and it was the mercy of G.o.d we weren't hit ... talk about wind-up.... And when we got in two bombers thought it was an attack, and took us for Boches.... Rather funny, while the strafe was going on I kept thinking, "Poor old Smith, he's a married man" (he was a few yards from me) ... and Smith tells me _he_ was thinking, "Mr. Penrose ... a married man ... married man...." What about some more whisky?'

Well, he made a joke of it, as one tries to do as long as possible, and that night was almost happily exhilarated, as a man sometimes is after escaping narrowly from an adventure. But I could see that it had been a severe shock. The next night he had a cold and a bad cough, and said he would not go out for fear of 'making a noise and giving the show away.'

The following night he went out, but came in very soon, and sat rather glum in the dug-out, thinking of something. (I always waited up till he came in to report, and we used to 'discuss the situation' over some whisky or a little white wine.)

The following day the Colonel gave him a special job to do. There was the usual talk of a 'raid' on a certain section of the enemy lines; but there was a theory that this particular section had been evacuated.

Flares were sent up from all parts of it, but this was supposed to be the work of one man, a hard worker, who walked steadily up and down, pretending to be a company. Harry was told off to test the truth of this myth--to get right up to that trench, to look in, and see what was in it. It was a thing he had done twice before, at least, though myself I should not have cared to do it at all. It meant the usual breathless, toilsome wriggle across No Man's Land, avoiding the flares and the two snipers who covered that bit of ground, finding a gap in the wire, getting through without being seen, without noise, without catching his clothes on a wandering barb, or banging his revolver against a mult.i.tude of tin cans. Then you had to listen and wait, and, if possible, get a look into the trench. When (and if) you had done that you had to get back, turn round in a tiny s.p.a.ce, pa.s.s the same obstacles, the same snipers.... If at any stage you were spotted the odds against your getting back at all were extremely large....

However, Harry was a scout, and it was his job. In the afternoon of that day I met him somewhere in the line and made some would-be jocular remark about his night's work. He seemed to me a little worried, preoccupied, and answered shortly. Hewett was sitting near, shaving in the sun, and said to him: 'You're a nasty, cold-blooded fellow, Harry, crawling about like a young snake every night. But I suppose you like it.'

Harry said slowly, with a casual air: 'Well, so I did, but I must say that strafe the other night put the wind up me properly--and when I went out last night I found I was thinking all the time, "Suppose they did that again?" ... and when I got on the top of a ridge or anywhere a bit exposed, I kept imagining what it would be like if all those machine-guns started just then ... simply dashed into a sh.e.l.l-hole ...

and I found myself working for safe spots where one would be all right in case of accidents.... Sort of lost confidence, you know.'

It was all said in a matter-of-fact manner, as if he was saying, 'I don't like marmalade so much as I used to do,' and there was no suggestion that he was not ready to go and look in the Boche Front Line or the Unter den Linden, if necessary. But I was sorry about this. I told him that he must not imagine; that that strafe was an unique affair, never likely to be repeated. But when I went back to the dug-out I spoke to the Colonel.

That night I went up with Harry to Foster Alley, and watched him writhing away into the grey gloom. There were many stars, and you could follow him for thirty yards. And as I watched I wondered, 'Is he thinking, "_Supposing they do that again?_" and when he gets over near the wire, will he be thinking, "_What would happen if they saw me now?_"

If so,' I said, 'G.o.d help him,' and went back to Headquarters.

Three hours later he came into the dug-out, where I sat with the Colonel making out an Intelligence Report. He was very white and tired, and while he spoke to the Colonel he stood at the bottom of the muddy steps with his head just out of the candlelight. All the front of his tunic was muddy, and there were two rents in his breeches.

He said, 'Very sorry, sir, but I couldn't get through. I got pretty close to the wire, but couldn't find a gap.' 'Was there much firing?'

said the Colonel. 'The usual two snipers and a machine-gun on the left; from what I heard I should say there were a good many men in that part of the trench--but I couldn't swear.' Now what the Colonel had wanted was somebody who _could_ swear; that was what the Brigade wanted; so he was not pleased. But he was a kind, understanding fellow, and all he said was, 'Well, I'm sorry, too, Penrose, but no doubt you did your best.' And he went to bed.

Then I opened some Perrier (we still had Perrier then), and gave Harry a strong whisky, and waited. For I knew that there was more. He talked for a little, as usual, about the mud, and the Boche line, and so on, and then he said: 'What I told the Colonel was perfectly true--I did get pretty close to the wire, and there wasn't a gap to be seen--but that wasn't the whole of it ... I couldn't face it.... The truth is, that show the other night was too much for me.... I found myself lying in a sh.e.l.l-hole pretending to myself that I was listening, and watching, and so on, but really absolutely stuck, trying to _make_ myself go on ...

and I couldn't.... I'm finished as a scout ... that's all.'

Well, it was all for the present. No thinking, human C.O. is going to run a man in for being beaten by a job like that. It is a specialist's affair, like firing a gun. It is his business to put the right man on the job, and if he doesn't, he can't complain.

So we made Harry Lewis gun officer. And that was the first stage.

VIII

Soon after that we went down to the Somme. It was autumn then, and all that desolate area of stark brown earth was wet and heavy and stinking.

Down the Ancre valley there were still some leaves in Thiepval Wood, and the tall trees along the river were green and beautiful in the thin October sun. But the centre of battle was coming up to that valley; in a month the green was all gone, and there was nothing to see but the endless uniform landscape of tumbled earth and splintered trunks, and only the big sh.e.l.ls raising vain waterspouts in the wide pools of the Ancre gave any brightness to the tired eye.

But you know about all this. Every Englishman has a picture of the Somme in his mind, and I will not try to enlarge it. We were glad, in a way, to go there, not in the expectation of liking it, but on the principle of Henry v.'s speech on the eve of St. Crispin. We saw ourselves in hospitals, or drawing-rooms, or bars, saying, 'Yes, we were six months on the Somme' (as indeed we were); we were going to be 'in the swing.'

But it was very vile. After Souchez it was real war again, and many Souchez reputations wilted there and died. Yet with all its horror and discomfort and fear that winter was more bearable than the Gallipoli summer. For, at the worst, there was a little respite, spasms of repose.

You came back sometimes to billets, cold, bare, broken houses, but still houses, where you might make a brave blaze of a wood fire and huddle round it in a cheery circle with warm drinks and a song or two. And sometimes there were estaminets and kind French women; or you went far back to an old chateau, perched over the village, and there was bridge and a piano and guests at Headquarters. Civilization was within reach, and sometimes you had a glimpse of it--and made the most of it.

But we had a bad time, as every one did. After a stiff three weeks of holding a nasty bit of the line, much digging of a.s.sembly trenches, and carrying in the mud, we took our part in a great battle. I shall not tell you about it (it is in the histories); but it was a black day for the battalion. We lost 400 men and 20 officers, more than twice the total British casualties at Omdurman. Hewett was killed and six other officers, the Colonel and twelve more were wounded. Eustace showed superb courage with a hideous wound. Harry and myself survived. Now I had made a mistake about Harry. After that scouting episode at Souchez I told myself that his 'nerve' was gone, that for a little anyhow he would be no good in action. But soon after we got to the Somme he had surprised me by doing a very good piece of work under fire. We were digging a new 'jumping-off' line in No Man's Land, two hundred men at work at once. They were spotted, the Boches dropped some Minnies about, and there was the beginnings of a slight stampede--you know the sort of thing--mythical orders to 'Retire' came along. All Harry did was to get the men back and keep them together, and keep them digging: the officer's job--but he did very well, and to me, as I say, surprisingly well. The truth was, as I afterwards perceived, that only what I may call his 'scouting' nerve was gone. It is a peculiar kind of super-nerve, as I have tried to show, and losing it he had lost a very valuable quality, but that was all at present.

Or I may put it another way. There is a theory held among soldiers, which I will call the theory of the favourite fear. Every civilian has his favourite fear, death by burning or by drowning, the fear of falling from a great height, or being mangled in a machine--something which it makes us shiver to think about. Among soldiers such special fears are even more acute, though less openly confessed, but in the evenings men will sometimes lie on the straw in the smoky barns and whisper the things of which they are most afraid.

It is largely a matter of locality and circ.u.mstance. In Gallipoli, where the Turks' rapid musketry fire was almost incredibly intense and their snipers uncannily accurate, men would say that they hated bullets, but sh.e.l.l-fire left them unmoved. The same men travelled to France and found rifle fire practically extinct but gun-power increasingly terrible, and rapidly reversed their opinions.

More often, however, there has been some particular experience which, out of a mult.i.tude of shocks, has been able to make a lasting impression, and leave behind it the favourite fear.

One man remembers the death of a friend caught by the gas without his gas mask, and is possessed with the fear that he may one day forget his own and perish in the same agony. And such is the effect on conduct of these obsessions that this man will neglect the most ordinary precautions against other dangers, will be reckless under heavy sh.e.l.l-fire, but will not move an inch without his respirator.

With others it is the fear of being left to die between the lines, caught on the wire and riddled by both sides, the fear of snipers, of 5-9's, even of whizz-bangs. One man feels safe in the open, but in the strongest dug-out has a horror that it may be blown in upon him. There is the fear of the empty trench, where, like a child on the dark staircase, another man is convinced that there are enemies lying behind the parapet ready to leap upon him; and there is the horror of being killed on the way down from the line after a relief.

But most to be pitied of all the men I have known, was one who had served at Gallipoli in the early days; few men then could have an orderly burial in a recognized ground, but often the stretcher-bearers buried them hastily where they could in and about the lines. This man's fear was that one day a sniper would get him in the head; that unskilled companions would p.r.o.nounce his death sentence, and that he would wake up, perhaps within a few yards of his own trench, and know that he was buried but not dead.

That was how it was with Harry. The one thing he could not face at present was crawling lonely in the dark with the thought of that tornado of bullets in his head. Nothing else frightened him--now--more than it frightened the rest of us, though, G.o.d knows, that was enough.

So that he did quite well in this battle in a sound, undistinguished way. He commanded a platoon for the occasion, and took them through the worst part of the show without exceptional losses; and he got as far as any of the regiment got. He held out there for two days under very heavy sh.e.l.l-fire, with a mixed lot of men from several battalions, and a couple of strange officers. In the evening of the second day we were to be relieved, and being now in command I sent him down with a runner to Brigade Headquarters to fix up a few points about our position and the relief. There was a terrific barrage to pa.s.s, but both of them got through. When his business was done he started back to rejoin the battalion. By that time it was about eleven o'clock at night, and the relief was just beginning; there was no reason why he should have come back at all; indeed, the Brigade Major told him he had better not, had better wait there in the warm dug-out, and join us as we pa.s.sed down.

Now when a man has been through a two days' battle of this kind, has had no sleep and hardly any food for two days, and finished up with a two-mile trudge over a stony wilderness of sh.e.l.l-holes, through a vicious barrage of heavy sh.e.l.ls; when after all this he finds himself, worn and exhausted so that he can hardly stand, but safe and comfortable in a deep dug-out where there are friendly lights and the soothing voices of calm men; and when he has the choice of staying there, the right side of the barrage, till it is time to go out to rest, or of going back through that same barrage, staggering into the same sh.e.l.l-holes, with the immediate prospect _of doing it all over again with men to look after as well as himself_--well, the temptation is almost irresistible. But Harry did resist it--I can't tell you how--and he started back. The barrage was worse than ever, all down the valley road, and, apparently, when they came near the most dangerous part, Harry's runner was. .h.i.t by a big splinter and blown twenty yards. There were no stretchers unoccupied for five miles, and it was evident that the boy--he was only a kid--would die in a little time. He knew it himself, but he was very frightened in that hideous valley where the sh.e.l.ls still fell, and he begged Harry not to leave him. And so we came upon them as we stumbled down, thanking our stars we were through the worst of it, Harry and the runner crouched together in a sh.e.l.l-hole, with the heart of the barrage blazing and roaring sixty yards off, and stray sh.e.l.ls all round.

From a military or, indeed, a common-sense point of view, it was a futile performance--the needless risk of a valuable officer's life.

They do not give decorations for that kind of thing. But I was glad he had stayed with that young runner.

And I only tell you this to show you how wrong I was, and how much stuff he had in him still.

II

And now Colonel Philpott comes into the story. I wish to G.o.d he had kept out of it altogether. He was one of a cla.s.s of officer with which our division was specially afflicted--at least we believed so, if only for the credit of the British Army; for if they were typical of the Old Army I do not know how we came out of 1914 with as much honour as we did. But I am happy to think they were not. We called them the Old Duds, and we believed that for some forgotten sin of ours, or because of a certain strong 'Temporary' spirit we had, they were dumped upon us by way of penalty. We had peculiarly few Regular officers, and so perhaps were inclined to be extra critical of these gentlemen. Anyhow, at one time they came in swarms, lazy, stupid, ignorant men, with many years of service--retired, reserve, or what not--but no discoverable distinction either in intellect, or character, or action. And when they had told us about Simla and all the injustices they had suffered in the matter of promotion or pay, they ousted some young and vigorous Temporary fellow who at least knew something of fighting, if there were stray pa.s.sages in the King's Regulations which he did not know by heart; and in about a week their commands were discontented and slack. In about two months they were evacuated sick (for they had no 'guts,' most of them), and that was the finest moment of their careers--for them and for us.

Lt.-Col. (Tem'y) W. K. Philpott (Substantive Captain after G.o.d knows how many years) out-dudded them all, though, to give him his due, he had more staying power than most of them. He took over the battalion when Colonel Roberts was wounded, and the contrast was painfully acute. I was his adjutant for twelve months in all, and an adjutant knows most things about his C.O. He was a short, stoutish fellow, with beady eyes and an unsuccessful moustache, slightly grey, like a stubble-field at dawn. He had all the exaggerated respect for authority and his superiors of the old-school Regular, with none of its sincerity; for while he said things about the Brigadier which no colonel should say before a junior officer, he positively cringed when they met. And though he bullied defaulters, and bl.u.s.tered about his independence before juniors, there was no superior military goose to whom he would have said the most diffident 'Bo.' He was lazy beyond words, physically and mentally, but to see him double out of the mess when a general visited the village was an education. It made one want to vomit....

Then, of course, he believed very strongly in 'The Book,' not Holy Writ, but all that ma.s.s of small red publications which expound the whole art of being a soldier in a style calculated to invest with mystery the most obvious truths. 'It says it in The Book' was his great gambit--and a good one too. Yet he betrayed the most astonishing ignorance of The Book. Any second lieutenant could have turned him inside out in two minutes on Field Service Regulations, and just where you expected him to be really efficient and knowledgeable, the conduct of trials, and Military Law, and so on, he made the most hideous elementary howlers.

But ignorance is easily forgivable if a man will work, if a man will learn. But he would neither. He left everything to somebody else, the second-in-command, the adjutant, the orderly-room. He would not say what he wanted (he very seldom knew), and when in despair you made out his orders for him he invariably disagreed; when he disagreed he was as obstinate as a mule, without being so clever. When he did agree it took half an hour to explain the simplest arrangement. If you asked him to sign some correspondence for the Brigade, he was too lazy and told you to sign it yourself; and when you did that he apologized to the Brigade for the irregularities of his adjutant--'a Temporary fellow, you know.'

For he had an ill-concealed contempt for all Temporaries; and that was perhaps one reason why we disliked him so much. He would not believe that a young officer, who had not spent twenty years drinking in mess-rooms, could have any military value whatever. Moreover, it annoyed him intensely (and here he had my sympathy) to see such men enjoying the same pay or rank as he had enjoyed during the almost apocryphal period of his captaincy. And having himself learned practically nothing during that long lotus-time, it was inconceivable to him that any man, however vigorous or intelligent, could have learned anything in two years of war.

Now let me repeat that I do not believe him to be typical of the Old Army, I know he was not (thank G.o.d); but this is a history of what happened to Harry, and Colonel Philpott was one of the things which happened--very forcibly. So I give him to you as we found him, and since he may be alive I may say that his name is fict.i.tious, though there are, unhappily, so many of him alive that I have no fears that he will recognize himself. He would not be the same man if he did.

We went out for a fortnight's rest after that battle, and Harry had trouble with him almost at once. He had amused and irritated Harry from the first--the Old Duds always did--for his respect for authority was very civilian and youthful in character; he took a man for what he was, and if he decided he was good stood by him loyally for ever after; if he did not he was severe, not to say intolerant, and regrettably lacking in that veneration for the old and incapable which is the soul of military discipline.